First thing, how many of you noticed that I said good online marketing strategy? Keep in mind, everything you do as an online marketer doesn’t need to be perfect, at least during the beginning phases of your adventure. As time moves forward, you’ll learn more techniques and gain experience where it’s needed.

Online marketing, internet marketing, affiliate marketing, whatever you want to call them, all have a learning curve. And an important part of making them work properly is simply by utilizing a strategy.

Developing systems

If you haven’t noticed it already, within the internet marketing sphere or realm as I like to call it, are some of the popular, common or basic strategies that are used by marketers. I don’t care who they are or what they claim to be, every online marketer has used or even continues to use the same basic strategies. Of course, more experienced marketers have simply improved on them.

Having a good online marketing strategy in place simply means developing systems around the work that you do. A strategy is simply that! Nothing more, nothing less. I bet some of you thought I was going to explain how to use some software or app that goes out and does everything for you. Like I said, there’s a learning curve.

Rushing things can be chaotic

There are so many marketers who often seem chaotic in how they run things. They throw a website up in some niche they haven’t researched with hopes of making it rich through AdSense or some other affiliate method. Don’t get me wrong and don’t start complaining yet.

Affiliate marketing is a great online business model to work with and AdSense can be profitable, if you do it right. For instance, let me bounce this question out to you. Why in the heck would you place AdSense ads on your primary sites? I’m talking more about your home site or your trophy site. Over the last few years I’ve visited a lot of sites where marketers continually do this as a source (or hope) of generating revenue.

Think about it, your home site is your brand. It’s where you want people to visit and hopefully learn something and eventually build a relationship. Placing AdSense ads on your home site ruins that opportunity. You work hard to drive visitors to your brand and instantly provide them a way out. You might as well grab a shovel and start digging a hole.

Which direction is best?

Here’s a tip and it won’t cost you a dime.

Internet marketers are famous for doing things in reverse order. I know it might sound strange or probably doesn’t make sense to you right now. But how many times have you heard ‘nothing seems to work’ – ‘I can’t get traffic to my site(s)’ – ‘I’ve read every book and nothing works’ – guess what, they probably skipped a few steps along the way. (I know it’s true because I started out the same way) Being young and enthusiastic I thought I could barrel my way through the system (there’s that word again-system, remember it!) without doing a lot of the necessary steps.

A while back, I read a blog post which mentioned something that pertains to this subject.

What is the shortest distance between two points?

I know, you’re probably thinking – duh! Or, if you forgot this from school, you’re Googling it right now.

It’s simply a straight line.

Now, if you’re trying to get from Point A to Point B and a couple of steps are required, wouldn’t you do them? Of course, you would, especially if you want to do things right. However, many online marketers simply skip a step or even all the steps that are needed and constantly wonder why things don’t work for them.

Bottom line here, everything with marketing online is discovered through step by step methods that work. That’s what makes a good online marketing strategy.

Now, going back to affiliate marketing, or should I say affiliate niche marketing, either way, it really doesn’t matter. What’s the first thing you’ll do to launch your new campaign? I’ll try and keep this simple as this post isn’t a training session for affiliate marketing. So, let’s say you’ve chosen a niche, one that you’re excited about and really want to be in (trust me, it may not seem like much, but that’s a huge step out of the way).

What’s next?

For simplicity sake, let’s just say while you might have chosen a topic, you’ll still need to know if it’s viable and worth your time. The niche you’ve decided to go with is basically your market, or more precisely, your target audience. Well, the first thing to do is research this market and discover what makes it tick. What are people searching for? What problems exist? Is there a possible solution? Write these things down and keep track of them.

Remember, I’m keeping things simple so the methods of doing things such as research will obviously vary.

What I’m trying to drive home here is, steps are required with any given strategy, no matter what it is. And, this may sound a little old school, write them down. It doesn’t matter how many times you do a step, WRITE THEM DOWN!

Write things down

Take a look at my work station here in this photo. I have specific notepads for individual projects or tasks that I’m working on. I learned this technique from my dad, so yes, it’s an old school method. Guess what? It works. The idea is simple, you’re more likely to remember something or at least better recall something if you write it down.

You’re probably rolling your eyes and saying how much easier it is to just copy and paste into a notepad or document. I still do that, but the method my dad taught me does work a tad bit better in helping me to remember things. Also, keep in mind, I’m part of the Millennial generation and we’re known for taking short cuts. Oops! That probably wasn’t the best way to describe my generation, but it’s often true.

Anyway, getting back to writing things down on paper. The whole point of doing this is to outline your own method of doing things. Through the process of doing tasks, you continually jot down each and every step as you develop your affiliate marketing business.

The neat thing about this, you can easily integrate other ideas that are used in various reports, eBooks, courses, trainings, or even from other marketers. You can also change or remove those things that don’t work or even some ideas that are simply not effective at what you’re trying to do.

When you think you’re finished with all your research and you build your niche website, take a moment and go through the steps you’ve written down.

• Are there any steps that are out of order?
• Are there things you should have done first?
• Is there a process or any steps that you possibly overlooked or even skipped?
• Are there steps where you wasted time by repeating your work?

Are you starting to get a picture of this?

If you write things down in the order that you do them, you’ll eventually create and develop your own strategy (a system or plan for doing things right).

When you repeat this process of your business, you’ll understand a little more and you’ll have the additional knowledge and experience that comes with it. And, with each new step you’ll be able to save time and money by simply refining the system you built.

If you follow the system you developed, which includes all the steps you’ve written down and outlined, you’ll soon discover how much easier it will be to get things done. And by the way, this will work for any area of online marketing, no matter what it is.

Try to remember this last tip – Every business, whether it’s offline (brick and mortar) or online, will have systems in place. And, a good online marketing strategy is simply to write down on paper the system you are using.